What does it mean to return home? After nearly fifty years in Iowa, France, Vermont and New York City, and deep into the global pandemic, Joanne Jacobson returned to the Midwest where she'd grown up-and to writing about home. In the Photic Zone borrows from oceanography the model of the "photic zone" the top layer of bodies of water, where photosynthesis-the generation of life from light-takes place. In these essays, Jacobson recovers the different forms that "home" has taken for her-family, geography, the body-and probes the emotional life that goes on beneath what's visible on the surface.